


Infinite Love

by storyandshark



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Statement, the vast
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-02
Updated: 2019-01-02
Packaged: 2019-10-02 15:35:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,912
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17266826
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/storyandshark/pseuds/storyandshark
Summary: Statement of Cordelia Matthews, regarding her various experiences with the ocean. Original statement given 17th July, 2006.





	Infinite Love

**Author's Note:**

> The title of this in my docs is "horny for the ocean" so take that as you will

I've never really been afraid of the ocean. Or have I? I don't know anymore, what is me and what is _me_. I am real now, but I'm not sure if the other me was fake or just... unenlightened. Unknowing, perhaps, though mine tells me that doesn't belong to us. That belongs to another, something that has never been me or mine.

But I'm rambling now, as I know I used to before I became myself.

I don't _think_ I've been afraid of the ocean, although by all rights I should have been, after all that happened. I've always felt a pull to it, I think, something in its depths that called to me. The same thing, perhaps, that called to my father when he drowned himself before I even turned ten. He'd drowned himself in liquor, first, and my whole family bore the scars, although I am the only one of us to hold them now. He simply filled all his pockets up with rocks and waded out into the tide. I pulled flowers from our garden and gave them to the ocean in thanks, although when my mother found out she forbid me from going down to the beach. As if she could ever understand.

I wonder sometimes: can anyone but me and mine understand? Yours can try to understand, and you come perhaps the closest, but you never can, not truly. Yours does not give the same love. Mine is infinite and powerful, you are confined to this hall of paper and whispering and the petty things you call knowledge. Can you know the infinite like I do, like mine does? Mine is the deepest trenches and you are the shoreline, toes buried in the sand as if you are safe from our relentless tide. We will wash away everything, in time, we wear away at the stone and dirt and sand. We will wash away your Archives, no matter how long you try to cling to your books. Books are easily destroyed by water, as I understand, just as yours will be.

Mine has become something more, hasn't it? All those stories of the ice melting, the seas rising. I like that. The thought that our world will return to perfect nothingness, the blue of the sky and the sea. The sky is not me, but it is of mine. If all the land and all the people are all swallowed up, there will be nothing left but mine. Just the sea and the sky and the space beyond it, stretching into the infinite reaches we cannot know. So simple, yet so deep. It will be ours, one day. Everything. Mine will win, in the end, after all of you are gone. The dark, perhaps, remains, but it is nothing compared to infinity.

Ah, rambling again. Is that me, I wonder, a sign that I have always been connected to mine through my tendency for pouring out so many words? Maybe, though words belong more to yours than mine.

I loved the ocean for claiming my father. I should have hated it for my sister. Did hate it, I think, though I'm not sure that's me.

My sister was a year older than me, and everything I wanted to be. Smart, strong, beautiful, with a charm that drew people to her like a fly to honey. I loved her. Still do, though that love is nothing compared to my love of mine. I was her shadow, by comparison, short and quiet and utterly unremarkable. It should have made me bitter, but it never did. She seemed happy, and I would never do anything to hurt that happiness. I think my love for her blinded me to what she actually felt. She was just as hurt by my father as I was, as my mother was, but she was soft and kind. She loved him still.

I'd snuck down to the ocean, one day, after my mother had gone to sleep. My sister followed. She told me she was worried about me, said that I had become distant after my father left. She said I'd gotten weird, always coming down to the coast when I could sneak out. Said I was disrespecting my father's memory by thanking the ocean for his death, because while he wasn't the nicest, he was still our father. I said that he deserved to die. My sister told me that no one needed to die, and that I should come back to the house.

I couldn't help it then. I screamed at her. How dare she disrespect the thing that had saved us? How dare she say that I was bad for paying thanks to what had killed my father? How dare she try to take me from the only thing I knew for sure loved me?

She said that she loved me, but she got that strange look in her eyes. She loved me for the idea of me, and her love was conditional. She only loved me if I was a good person to her standards, and being grateful for the death of another human was not good to her standards.

I turned to walk away, to go further down the beach and away from her. She followed after me, and I ran, rocks in the sand digging into my feet. She tripped behind me, started crying, said she'd hurt herself. Shouted to tell me that she needed help, begged me not to leave her alone. I didn't care then, I was just angry. I did turn back, though, when she screamed as the tide swelled out toward her. She stopped screaming as the sea swallowed her. She never screamed again.

I tried to call for help, but the roar of the waves swallowed my cries. I tried to swim out to find her, but the water just pushed me back to shore. I swore I could hear whispering then. Thought it was my sister, but now I'm not so sure. Not yet, it said. Not yet. I cried until my mother found me the next morning.

They found my sisters body washed up on shore several miles away. Eaten by fish and birds, battered and bloated by the sea. They wouldn't let my mother see the body, and at that point I was too numb to care.

I can't remember my sister's name. Should that make me sad?

The sea claimed my mother a year later, just a few months after I turned sixteen. She'd started drinking after my sister died, just like my father had. I think she cared about me once, but she cared about my sister more. She told me one night that she wanted to be with her. I watched as she filled all her pockets up with rocks and waded out into the tide.

I went out to the ocean after I watched her disappear. I asked it why. It spoke back to me. It said that my family wasn't right. That I was something more than all of them, and that I needed to be free of them to know it. The ocean was right. I tried to find other people, boys I took home, friends I made before we drifted apart just months later. I felt empty.

He was my fifth boyfriend, I believe, picked him up during a class at uni that I could afford because of all the life insurance. I'd felt empty for a while then, a therapist a friend had made me visit told me it was depression and maybe that was right, though I'm not sure now. I think mine was hungry. I think mine wanted me to feed it, to become it.

I took my boyfriend, whose name I don't remember and don't care to, back to my house and drowned him in the bathtub. Not sure why. Just felt right. It did feel good, although it didn't quite feel as right as it could have. I dumped the body easier than I expected, and no one was any the wiser, especially my next boyfriend. He didn't even realize when I said we should go out swimming in the ocean. I held his head under the water until he stopped moving and his lungs were all filled up with the salt. Then I let him drift away. And I felt full.

Is that what you want? I asked the ocean. No, it said. It wanted me. And that was beautiful. No one had ever wanted me. Not my sister, who cared so much but hated me for not being as good as her, not my mother, who loved her more than me, not my father, who hated me the most. Not any of the people that lied and told me they loved me. I tried to drown myself then, but I washed back up to shore and coughed the brine out of my lungs. Not yet, it said again. Not until you're ready. Not until you understand. It told me some things itself, though it said that understanding belonged to yours.

It's remarkably easy to lie about why you're here reading those petty little papers. Statements, you call them? Yes, statements. Most of them are dull. Not mine. Still, I took what mine had told me and found out some of the rest. Yours called on me to stay, if I wanted, but I didn't want. I wonder if that's what you're thinking, as I look at you through the window as I write this. I wonder if you think I belong to you, because I am a bright young lady from university that enjoys supernatural research. Foolish, yours is, unable to truly grasp the bigger picture. And mine is truly the bigger picture, since it is infinite. It is _vast_ , that is what you call it, though for all the power yours puts into words I thought you would make a longer one for such a concept.

Did you know that we (humans, that is, not mine, for mine is everything and knows all the endless depths) have explored more of space than the ocean? The ocean in our own world? It all seems so absurd. Of course, there are many things with teeth in the ocean, but it is far less deep and than the blackness that surrounds us. At least, that is what a mind could reason, but depth no longer matters when you reach below the surface into the dark, when the pressure crushes you into nothing. A thousand feet is the same as ten thousand. You could lose yourself forever in those depths. Is that why you are afraid of it? That doesn't matter, though, for I am not afraid of it. I am not afraid of what makes me.

I should be afraid of the ocean now, for all the people it has claimed. But I am not. I love it because it loves me, a truer love than any small human could give me. You are all so small. Many of the creatures that live in the depths could swallow a person whole. Things that small do not matter. You are like insects in mine's terms, tiny things to be crushed into even more nothing. I am nothing now, like you, but mine will make me something. I can grow, stretch, become. I will become something massive, something worth fearing.

Something worth loving.

I will be infinite.

I will be vast.


End file.
